Back from my final day of furlough and ramping up coverage of the Final Four, post-season basketball and spring football. But the coaching carousel had to be the first topic, given the developments Monday.

Not surprising: John Calipari interested in Kentucky.

Surprising: Kentucky’s reported offer of $5 mill/year.

(That’s even more than the top-end college football coaches make — take that, Saban! — and bball salaries have generally trailed those for football.)

Multiple reactions to a handful of developments … I’m sure there will be cause for another action/reaction post in coming days. It’s busy time on and off the field/court.

Action: Stanford beats Texas Tech and Hartford, improves to 10-0 (best start since 2003-04) entering league play.Reaction I: Beating Texas Tech, even by 45 points, is hardly reason to sound the trumpets: The Red Raiders are winless on the road and lost at UTEP by 18. (UTEP is 7-5, by the way.) The fact that Stanford only led Hartford by seven points with five minutes left is just as, if not more, telling. (Hartford is 4-9 and lost to Brown by double digits.)

It’s been more than a month since the last Hotline post on the Stanford coaching change. That’s not because I haven’t thought about it, or talked about it, or read about it.

It remains a hot topic of conversation with my college basketball contacts — probably the hottest. But instead of posting morsels here and there, I opted to wait until there were a handful of topics to address all at once.